Information on MEGA has never been free or easy to obtain. A government agency can take up to 15 business days to respond to a request under Michigan's Freedom of Information Act and may charge the requester an amount equal to the cost of, in the case of the MEDC, the "lowest-paid MEDC staff capable of performing the tasks to process" the request.[4] At the MEDC, that amount typically exceeds $40 an hour.[5] In the past, however, information was eventually forthcoming.

This has changed for the worse. MEGA's data sources have become much less detailed and helpful in recent years, rendering many measures of MEGA's efficacy impossible to calculate. These changes and their effects on monitoring MEGA's progress are described in the sections that follow.